Note: This page is part of a short series. Please read the page on Phonetic Reform first for background on these reforms.

While devising my featural phonetic alphabet for English, I decided to take the opportunity to make a few grammatical changes that have niggled me for years. After all, these are my reforms, and there is no prospect of anyone else adopting them, so why be niggardly in my efforts? Moreover, the phonetic and grammatical reforms stand alone: using the former does not mean you have to use the latter.

This page on grammatical reform has come last, long after the pages on my phonetic and numerical reforms were written. This was intentional. I was entirely comfortable with the phonetic changes, as they were sirimply descriptive, utilitarian alterations. Like many languages, English had once been largely phonetic; this change simply restored the language to its former utility. The new featural script is admittedly a bigger change, but in practice, once I devised the transliteration back into Latin characters this was somewhat moot. The internet is set up to use Latin characters, or at the very least Unicode characters. I cannot simply introduce my novel script for typing, and it is tricky trying to design a custom font, so the featural script is for now restricted to my pen and paper notes. With that set aside, there is really very little reason for me not to use the reformed spelling wherever possible. Separately, the numeric reforms have clear utilitarian value, as outlined in the page on numeric reform, and I therefore felt very little controversy in writing them up promptly and fully.

The grammatical reform is different. It is a significant change to usage, and its benefits are mostly about my personal minimalist aesthetic preference for elegant simplicity in systems and philosophies. I can produce arguments for this being an objectively valuable approach—Ockham's Razor and all that, especially for pedagogy. Yet, in keeping with my principle that we humans are primarily beasts, myself wholly included, I will cheerfully confess the subjective aesthetic significance of this for me. Simplicity and orderliness have for me a value in their own right, prior to any utilitarian value they may have.

This though goes alongside a recognition of path dependency. As explained elsewhere, my aim with these linguistic reforms is primarily to strike a happy balance—happy from my perspective, that is; most others seem happy with the status quo—between absolute minimalist simplicity and deference to the existing forms, which have an organic, affectionate beauty of their own. Often the project has been to identify the underlying forms of the language and bring those to the fore. I will try to go into more detail on this in each section.

There are three sections, the third of which is much longer than the others.

1. Personal Pronouns

(Don't worry: this part of the project is not about the idiosyncratic pronouns belovéd of social justice warriors; I will not be encouraging you to identify as your inner faeself.)

I have standardised the format of the personal pronouns. English still has different pronouns for subject and object as a legacy from Anglo-Saxon. But ever since we started defining subject and object by order rather than by pronoun, this has been at best irrelevant, and at most a confusion. If a foreigner pointed at someone and said, “Me likes he”, I would not think, like an Anglo-Saxon, that the third party liked the foreigner (“He likes me”), but that the foreigner liked the third party (“I like him”). Despite the form of all three words insisting on the first usage, the order now always takes precedence. The different subject-object pronouns are thus completely useless, like a vestigial appendix. So I have combined them together.

I have also resurrected the second-person singular pronoun, “thee”. Rehabilitating “thee” has been a hobby-horse of mine for many years, long before this project itself was conceived. Perhaps it will erode again, but the distinction is continually recreated organically by communities all over the world: “y'all” / “you all”; “you guys”; “youse”; “everyone” / “everybody”; these and many more are used as ersatz second-person plural pronouns, because that is a useful distinction to make.

I noticed that nearly all pronouns have an [-ii] form, even if archaic: me; thee; he; she; we; ye. To take advantage of this, the standardisation therefore sets them all personal pronouns to the -ii form. The consonant tends to keep the original -ii form consonant. “They” and “them” have been changed to [dii] so as not to compete with “thee”. Despite being such a notorious bigot¹, I am actually pretty blasé about whether the sexed third-person singular pronoun distinction needs to be retained. We do fine without sexed first-person and second-person pronouns, singular or plural. We do fine without sexed third-person plural pronouns. Many languages do fine without sexed third-person singular pronouns. Still, an advantage of this system is that it can accommodate some ambivalence. The form [ʃii] works if you want sexed third-person singular pronouns, or you can stick with just [hii] if you want the pronouns to be standardised further.

More controversially, in an act of flagrant disrespect to my Indo-European ancestors' determination to distinguish the animate from the inanimate, I don't like “it”. I think it's ugly, and clearly doesn't fit any of the other personal pronouns in form. So I would like to kill it—and yet, it is very hard to kill!² There remains a residual Indo-European in me who is loath to refer to animate and inanimate objects with the same third-person singular pronoun. In practice, I have been compromising by replacing “it” with “this” and “that” where plausible, which at least form part of an obvious set of pointing pronouns with “these” and “those”, and when “it” makes most sense I am thinking of it mostly with those pointing pronouns.

Basic Pronouns

I / Me	mii
You / You [single]	ðii
He / She / It / Him / Her / It	hii [ʃii / it]
We / Us	wii
You / You [plural]	yii
They / Them	dii

Possessive pronouns are indicated with a terminal [-s]. This is an actual [s] phoneme, not a [z], as is common with terminal “s” in traditional English. While we're talking about possession, for non-pronouns it is indicated by adding [-iis] to the word, reflecting the pronoun usage. So, “John's cat” becomes [jon-iis kat]. I have generally retained the hyphen for non-pronoun possessives, partly so I can eliminate the apostrophe because that frees it up for phonetic emphasis, and partly because I just think hyphens are neat³.

Possessive Pronouns

My / Mine	miis
Your / Yours [single]	ðiis
His / Her / Its / His / Hers / Its	hiis [ʃiis / itiis]
Our / Ours	wiis
Your / Yours [plural]	yiis
Their / Theirs	diis

2. Plurals

This is a simple change: all plurals now have the [-iz] ending already used by nouns ending in [s] (“kisses” [kisiz]), [ʃ] (“bashes” [baʃiz]), [z] (“quizzes” [kwiziz]), [ʒ] (no clear cases owing to the restricted usage of [ʒ], but in modern slang more than one bourgeois person could be referred to “bougies” [bʊʊʒiiz]), [c] (“patches” [paciz]), or [j] (“badges” [bajiz]).

Words like “beaks” therefore now become [biikiz], etc. A side effect is that the hidden terminal approximants are now sounded in plurals: “waiters” [weitəz] becomes [weitəriz]; “plays” [pleiz] becomes [pleiyiz]; “cows” [kaʊz] becomes [kaʊwiz]; “things” [θiŋz] becomes [θiŋgiz]. For neatness, irregular plurals have all been changed to the [-iz] ending, so “men” [men] becomes [maniz], etc.

Oh no, you cry, how will we distinguish plurals from “is”? Well, first, you already distinguish them fine after [s/ʃ/z/ʒ/c/j], and second, keep reading.

3. Tenses

This is the biggest topic by far, requiring some detailed tables. Let's look at a few preliminary sub-topics first.

The Être Verb

That is, “be” and its dizzying array of variants: “is”; “am”; “are”; “was”; “were”; “been”; “being”⁴. Though this verb technically has a residual sense of existence (“To be or not to be?”), in practice it is never used today. Instead, the être verb in English is used grammatically, to apply adjectives (and other words functioning temporarily as adjectives) to nouns: “I am happy”; “Snow is white”; “Hesperus is Phosphorus”. Crucially for our purpose here, this includes the adjectives known as participles, that is, verbs used as adjectives, such as “United Kingdom” or “Flying Circus”.

If you've read the previous sections, you can probably tell where this is going: all forms other than “be” (and “being”) are dead. There is no benefit to them. If I say, “We is happy”, you aren't confused as to whether I really meant to refer to just one person: you correctly assume that I simply got the wrong form of “be”. I wanted to retain an “-ing” form for the continuous tense, the participle, and the gerund, and only “be” has an -ing form; “be” is the standard form of the verb; and I separately wanted to kill “is” to remove conflict with the plurals⁵; so for all of these reasons, “be” was the obvious choice to retain.

The Avoir Verb

“Have” is an irritatingly ambiguous word with three different broad meanings:

1. Possession: “I have a go.” (cf. “I possess a go.”)
2. Compulsion (with “to”): “I have to go.” (cf. “I must go.”)
3. Grammatical: “I have gone.”

Never one to fear cutting the Gordian knot, only one of these has kept its [hav] pronunciation. Firstly, I have taken advantage of the common variant pronunciation for compulsive “have”: [haf]. Since the grammatical reforms are never used without the phonetic reforms, this usage is now e.g. “mii haf tə goʊʷ.” Secondly, grammatical “have” is frequently contracted in spoken English, and even when not, loses its [h], so that is now simply [av]: “miiy av goʊ”]. This means that possessive “have” is the only form still to have the [hav] pronunciation.

Tenses of Future Past

This is the biggest and most difficult section. The tenses want some clean-up, as they are inconsistent and over-long. I was also keen to separate the past tense from the participle form. But how aggressive to be?

At first I went for an exceptionally aggressive approach, because why not. Following the “-ed” suffix example of the past tense (and the participles), I turned “is xxxing” to [xxxin] (no auxiliary être verb), “have xxxed” to [xxxiv], and “has been xxxing” to [xxxinv], followed by [-id] and [-il] for past and future tense. This is exceptionally efficient and might be possible in a brand new language used by cleverer people than me. In practice, however, it trades too much legibility for its efficiency.

I followed this interesting failure with the inverse approach: instead of using terse suffixes to the verb (like “-ed”), I would use prefatory auxiliary verbs (like “will”). This change finally made the system work. Many fundamental semantic functions in standard English are performed via auxiliary verbs: modality (“I might go”); normativity (“I ought to go”); as well as the future (“I will go”) and the purely grammatical functions described above (“I am gone”, “I have gone”).

The past tense is now always marked with [did] in the same way that the future tense is marked with [wil]. [biiʸ] and [av] are used as described above. The result sounds much more natural to a native English speaker's ear. I wanted to get rid of the être prefix to ‘-ing’ words, but couldn't figure out a way to make it work cleanly with complex constructions like “I will have been being kicked”, but I did manage to remove the ‘-ed/n’ endings. I also retained ‘ŋᵍ’ (usage as per the phonetic article) rather than trying to transition to ‘n’.

For interest's sake, and because at the time of writing many articles on this site still use the deprecated [-in/v-id/l] system, the following tables show the deprecated system in column two and the (present) full reform in column three. This section also includes the adjectival participle, which I think works exactly how you would expect it to given the above rules.

Active

I kick	mii kik	mii kik
I am kicking	mii kikin	mii bii kikiŋᵍ
I have kicked	mii kikiv	miiy av kikəð
I have been kicking	mii kikinv	miiy av bii kikiŋᵍ
I kicked	mii kikid	mii did kik
I was kicking	mii kikinid	mii did bii kikiŋᵍ
I had kicked	mii kikivid	mii did av kik
I had been kicking	mii kikinvid	mii did av bii kikiŋᵍ
I will kick	mii kikil	mii wil kik
I will be kicking	mii kikinil	mii wil bii kikiŋᵍ
I will have kicked	mii kikivil	mii wil av kik
I will have been kicking	mii kikinvil	mii wil av bii kikiŋᵍ

Passive

I am kicked	mii bii kikəð	mii bii kikəð
I am being kicked	mii biiyin kikəð	mii bii biiyiŋᵍ kikəð
I have been kicked	mii biiyiv kikəð	miiy av bii kikəð
I have been being kicked	mii biiyinv kikəð	miiy av bii biiyiŋᵍ kikəð
I was kicked	mii biiyid kikəð	mii did bii kikəð
I was being kicked	mii biiyinid kikəð	mii did bii biiyiŋᵍ kikəð
I had been kicked	mii biiyivid kikəð	mii did av bii kikəð
I had been being kicked	mii biiyinvid kikəð	mii did av bii biiyiŋᵍ kikəð
I will be kicked	mii biiyil kikəð	mii wil bii kikəð
I will be being kicked	mii biiyinil kikəð	mii wil bii biiyiŋᵍ kikəð
I will have been kicked	mii biiyivil kikəð	mii wil av bii kikəð
I will have been being kicked	mii biiyinvil kikəð	mii wil av bii biiyiŋᵍ kikəð

Adjectival Participle

The kicking player…	ðə kikiŋ pleiyəʳ…	ðə kikiŋᵍ pleiyəʳ…
The kicked ball…	ðə kikəð boəl…	ðə kikəð boəl…
Kicking me…	kikiŋ mii…	kikiŋᵍ mii…
Kicked by me…	kikəð bai mii…	kikəð bai mii…
Having kicked me…	kikiviŋ mii…	aviŋᵍ kik mii…
Being kicked by me…	biiyiŋ kikəð bai mii…	biiyiŋᵍ kikəð bai mii…
Having been kicked by me…	biiyiviŋ kikəð bai mii…	aviŋᵍ bii kikəð bai mii…

Quaestor, Imperator

Questions and commands deserve a distinguishing format of their own. In standard English, formally this is done solely through word order, selection, and emphasis. “You are happy.” becomes the question “Are you happy?” and the command “(You,) be happy.”. I don't think this is as clear as it could be, and is weird to learn.

I was inspired by the way an auxiliary verb is placed at the front of the sentence in a question. I also followed my pattern of considering informal usages. One can ask a question by simply saying the sentence in a questioning tone (“You're happy?”). Sometimes one prefaces a question by literally saying the word “question” (“Question: are you happy?”). Similarly, commands are often prefaced by a verb used like an auxiliary verb: “Come, let us reason together”; “Please, be seated”; etc.

In keeping with this insight, and re-inforced by my adoption of auxiliary verbs for tenses, I picked a short standard word each for questions and commands. I decided that each should be a basically original word, so it would avoid confusion with any normal sense of the word, but that it should be reminiscent of an existing word with a related sense. Hence, the question preface is [kwes], and the command preface is [kom] (distinct from “come” [kum]). Tables follow.

Active Question

Do I kick?	kwes mii kik?	kwes mii kik?
Am I kicking?	kwes mii kikin?	kwes mii bii kikiŋᵍ?
Have I kicked?	kwes mii kikiv?	kwes miiy av kikəð?
Have I been kicking?	kwes mii kikinv?	kwes miiy av bii kikiŋᵍ?
Did I kick?	kwes mii kikid?	kwes mii did kik?
Was I kicking?	kwes mii kikinid?	kwes mii did bii kikiŋᵍ?
Had I kicked?	kwes mii kikivid?	kwes mii did av kik?
Had I been kicking?	kwes mii kikinvid?	kwes mii did av bii kikiŋᵍ?
Will I kick?	kwes mii kikil?	kwes mii wil kik?
Will I be kicking?	kwes mii kikinil?	kwes mii wil bii kikiŋᵍ?
Will I have kicked?	kwes mii kikivil?	kwes mii wil av kik?
Will I have been kicking?	kwes mii kikinvil?	kwes mii wil av bii kikiŋᵍ?

Passive Question

Am I kicked?	kwes mii bii kikəð?	kwes mii bii kikəð?
Am I being kicked?	kwes mii biiyin kikəð?	kwes mii bii biiyiŋ kikəð?
Have I been kicked?	kwes mii biiyiv kikəð?	kwes miiy av bii kikəð?
Have I been being kicked?	kwes mii biiyinv kikəð?	kwes miiy av bii biiyiŋ kikəð?
Was I kicked?	kwes mii biiyid kikəð?	kwes mii did bii kikəð?
Was I being kicked?	kwes mii biiyinid kikəð?	kwes mii did bii biiyiŋ kikəð?
Had I been kicked?	kwes mii biiyivid kikəð?	kwes mii did av bii kikəð?
Had I been being kicked?	kwes mii biiyinvid kikəð?	kwes mii did av bii biiyiŋ kikəð?
Will I be kicked?	kwes mii biiyil kikəð?	kwes mii wil bii kikəð?
Will I be being kicked?	kwes mii biiyinil kikəð?	kwes mii wil bii biiyiŋ kikəð?
Will I have been kicked?	kwes mii biiyivil kikəð?	kwes mii wil av bii kikəð?
Will I have been being kicked?	kwes mii biiyinvil kikəð?	kwes mii wil av bii biiyiŋ kikəð?

Command / Imperative

Kick me	kom kik mii	kom kik mii
You, kick me	kom ðii kik mii	kom ðii kik mii
Be kicking me	kom kikin mii	kom bii kikiŋ mii
You, be kicking me	kom ðii kikin mii	kom ðii bii kikiŋ mii
Have me kicked	kom kikiv mii	kom av kik mii
You, have me kicked	kom ðii kikiv mii	kom ðiiy av kik mii
Be having me kicked	kom kikinv mii	kom av kikiŋ mii
You, be having me kicked	kom ðii kikinv mii	kom ðiiy av kikiŋ mii

Conclusions

I have been using versions of these reforms in practice for nearly two years now, and am satisfied enough with them to write them up. There will surely be future changes to these core elements, but for now I think they are stable and only need incremental changes. Additional work for the future could include standardisation of more elements, but I think this is sufficient for now.

This page is part of a short series. You may also be interested in my thoughts about Phonetic Reform and Numeric Reform.